


Blue

by panda_hiiro



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:52:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panda_hiiro/pseuds/panda_hiiro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He didn't yet know to consider himself 'human,' didn't even know that he needed a name at all. He knew that he was different from the white birds that wheeled aimlessly in the sky (although he did not yet know to call them birds, or to call it a sky), but he could not say why, or how.</p><p>He learned quickly."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue

His first memory was a color.

Blue - it became everything, the endless stretch of the sky, the vast emptiness of the sea. Of course, he didn't have names for any of that, yet. There were no words at all, not then, and the only thing he could remember was feeling like he, too, was part of that blue, blue eternity. 

He couldn't quite recall when he first became aware of some sense of self, when he learned to separate himself from the waves and the gulls and the seaweed. But it happened, at some point, as spontaneously as he'd arrived in that world. He didn't yet know to consider himself 'human,' didn't even know that he needed a name at all. He knew that he was different from the white birds that wheeled aimlessly in the sky (although he did not yet know to call them birds, or to call it a sky), but he could not say why, or how.

He learned quickly. The first time he understood hunger was the hardest - fortunately, there were stores of food inside his shelter that even his tiny fingers could manipulate, and once he understood that the act of eating would stave off the pain in his stomach, he had no trouble keeping himself fed.

He learned a lot about pain: what a sharp blade does to skin, and what it feels like to fall from a height. These were the difficult lessons, and they kept him from being over ambitious in his explorations - and so he learned caution, and how to watch and observe and anticipate consequences before acting.

There was something blissful about those early years, when everything was still new and he didn't know enough to be concerned with anything past those basic things that kept him alive. There was a kind of peace in the silence, in the sameness - he was more an extension of his environment than he was a being living in it, and perhaps it was this that kept him from ever feeling alone.

But eventually that hazy time passed, and he began to understand what it meant to be a singular entity. He had never had any reason to question anything before - things were simply the way they were and always had been - but with this newly developed sense of separateness came the notion that something about his world was not right. 

Who and what was he? How had he come here? Where was this place?

And why was he alone?

He picked up clues, as he grew older, the same way he picked up everything he needed to survive. Although he was, and always had been, utterly alone - save for Cal, who he was old enough now to realize was not alive in the same way he was - there were still traces of an invisible guardian, a ghost-presence that, for all it's intangibility, was still powerfully real. Someone had known he was coming. Someone had made sure he would be safe. 

He started to build that presence in his mind, tried to give it some sense of shape and form. Different faces: sometimes a mother, sometimes a father, sometimes a grandparent. Sometimes something not even human at all. His favorite imagining was a brother, distant enough to be admired, just close enough to serve as shelter. The movies left behind for him colored his perception of the perfect guardian in the same way they molded him. Not the least of the things these films taught him was speech - the first time he turned the television on, the sound of another human's voice had startled him so badly that he'd promptly turned it back off and wouldn't go near it again for a long time. But eventually he did, and from then on the screen was hardly ever silent. He listened, and watched, and mimicked the actor's motions in front of mirrors, until he was able to recite the lines flawlessly. From this, too, he learned style - he spent hours exploring the wardrobifier (that was what he called it, anyway) and combing his hair back into improbable styles just to see if they would hold. He was an amalgamation of images stolen from a screen, with no one to see his efforts but himself.

He moved on to the computer next.

This was a more daunting task - but accomplished with no less ease. And when, at last, his hands were big enough to reach, and his mind sharp enough to transform the symbols into language, he clamored onto the computer desk and found a chat box open and waiting for him. Carefully, he typed into it,

 

_"Is anyone out there?"_

 

He stared for a long time at that empty text box, the cursor blinking a slow, steady rhythm.  He was old enough now to question, to wonder, to reason, and for not the first time he thought that if he were the only person left alive in the whole world, then was he really alive at all?

He knew what dreaming was. There was always that space in his mind, a rich, dark purple room waiting for him when he closed his eyes. It felt as real there as this empty apartment, though it was just as isolated. How could he be certain which space was reality? Could he even tell if either one was real?

He wanted to exist. He wanted to prove it. He wanted it more badly than anything.

Scrap metal was surprisingly easy to find. He could pry some from the apartment fixtures, dismantle things he didn't need. The rest could be found underwater, by diving into the cold, clear sea and rummaging through the ruins below the surface. Once collected he threw himself into building, not sure what he was making, not sure if he had a goal at all. It took a long time to get it right, but when his machine finally hummed to life he felt for the first time the sense of satisfaction. The robot stared down at him, a smooth mask of metal. He named it Sawtooth. 

The chat client stayed silent. He never typed into it again.  

Time had never held much meaning for him. Day and night held little difference, and there was hardly any point in segmenting his life into weeks and days and hours and minutes. The more he pored through the histories archived on his computer, though, the more he started to regiment his own routines. Exploration in the morning. Sword practice in the afternoon. Building at night. The distances of time and space became concrete concepts: the last humans died over a hundred years ago. He had been alive for a fraction of that. Earth was 24,901 miles around, of which had only ever seen a tiny, tiny portion. All this knowledge made him feel infinitesimally small, and lonely. 

Nighttime was always the worst. He stood on the roof his apartment, staring out across the vast emptiness of the ocean and the reflection of the starlit sky on the black surface. It stretched on, on, impossibly far, until all that blackness seemed to knit itself together into one seamless form. Still the sky was impossibly bright, filled with those tiny, glittering bits of light. He liked to watch them, sometimes, pick them out - Proxima Centauri, 4.243 light years away. Pollux, 33.78 light years. Alcyone, burning blue-white and 370 far, far light years away.

It would take more lifetimes than he could imagine to travel to one of those distant stars, but he couldn't help wondering what would happen if he tried. If he just…left, searching for something. For anything. Anywhere, away from here. Drifting, lost, until there was nothing left of him but stardust. 

A sharp noise jolted him out of his reverie. He couldn't place it - some jangling little chime he'd never heard before. Curiously, he picked up the sunglasses he'd abandoned to the floor - he'd programmed a prototype computer into them, just a rudimentary mirror of his desktop, enough for him to pull up whatever he needed when he was outside. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Except…

There. In the corner. He had almost forgotten it was running. The little icon for the Pesterchum application bounced and bobbed at him, happily proclaiming "You have (1) new message." 

He opened it, his throat dry, his heart racing. 

There, beneath his own message, a name he didn't recognize, and two words that would change his life forever. 

_i'm here_


End file.
